Interview: The Needs Of The Many

Throughout her career, education historian Diane Ravitch has
relentlessly chronicled the ill effects that the progressive emphasis
upon "meeting the needs of the child" has had on America's most
disenfranchised children. Indeed, her new book, Left Back: A
Century of Failed School Reforms (Simon & Schuster), is an
exhaustive look at the subject. In the 560-page tome, Ravitch argues
that, while the white and well-to-do have always had access to what she
calls "the good stuff"—rigorous treatments of history,
mathematics, and English, for example—other students have been
saddled with consumer math and exercises in self-esteem. Much of this
tracking has been done under the auspices of "meeting needs." But
educators who provide children with learning experiences that match
their social situations are inadvertently promoting a form of
educational predestination, Ravitch argues.

While serving as an assistant secretary of education during the
Bush administration, Ravitch played a central role in launching a
standards movement she hoped would give all students access to solid
curricula. Despite her association with Republicans and a movement
resented by some as authoritarian, Ravitch insists she's an
independent, both in politics and in education. This is a credible
claim. In Left Back, as well as earlier books, Ravitch clearly
states that she is not attacking all progressivism; in fact, she
praises contemporary educators such as Ted Sizer for focusing on the
needs of individual students. She also notes, without embarrassment,
that her children attended a progressive, albeit academically rigorous,
private school in New York City.

Contributing writer David Ruenzel recently reached Ravitch, now a
research professor at New York University and a fellow at the Brookings
Institution, at her home in Brooklyn. She spoke of her new book, the
vagaries of the progressive movement, and her hopes for American
education.

Q:What inspired you to write such an extensive work on
the influence of progressivism on American education?

A: What intrigued me, and what became the theme of Left
Back, was this constant attack on the academic curriculum—so
much so that the very phrase "academic" had become a term of derision.
It didn't start out that way, but somewhere along the way there had
been this redefinition of who was supposed to learn the good
stuff—a rigorous academic curriculum—and what this good
stuff was. So I was trying to understand how we came to this idea that
the good stuff was reserved for only a small portion of our population,
which struck me as a deeply anti-democratic idea.

Q:You argue that limiting an academic curriculum to a
select few goes back a long way.

A: Yes, the idea first became popular and forceful with the
industrial education movement of the early 20th century. The
intelligence test was the mechanism for deciding who could get the good
stuff and who could not.

Q:Is it possible to give a concise definition of
progressive education?

A: It means different things at different times. It also
means different things in public school and private school. Some
private schools have done remarkably rich things with progressivism.
But in public schools it has usually turned into tracking, IQ testing,
dividing up the curriculum—rich offerings for a few, weak
offerings for the rest.

One of the most pernicious progressive ideas, the one that led to
the worst excesses of tracking, is that you fit the education to the
needs of the child. Once you add to that, "Let's fit the education to
the needs of society," you get people saying things like, "The children
of farmers should learn agriculture." Soon education becomes tied to a
specific vocation; what a child's parents do is what the child should
be educated to do. It's not hard to see how this easily becomes a
racist and classist way of apportioning out educational
opportunity.

Q:Historically, how have teachers reacted to
progressivism?

A: As far as I can tell, there was always a very strong
resistance on the part of classroom teachers to its excesses because
they always saw themselves as prepared to actually teach something like
languages, science, and math. Then they were told by the "experts" that
this wasn't needed anymore because they were going into a utilitarian
mode of teaching kids. After World War I, curriculum experts like John
Bobbit and W.W. Charters would survey school districts and tell
educators, "You don't have enough IQ testing, vocational ed; you're not
modern because you're trying to teach foreign language to everyone."
Teachers were usually not the ones leading the progressive movement and
were usually considered a problem by leading reformers.

Q:I get the impression from Left Back that you
hold ed schools responsible for these excesses of progressive
education.

A: I try not to have villains. But it's true that there has
always been a child-centered ideology in ed schools. Their stance
against the academic curriculum has very deep roots. Ed schools will
only change when they see that the public is serious when it says that
it wants all kids to be well-educated.

Q:How much is the current emphasis on constructivism part
of the problem?

A: The idea that kids can invent knowledge for
themselves—what most educators mean by constructivism—seems
fairly empty. My own kids would be exposed to this kind of thing and
laugh about it. "Today I was a salmon swimming upstream," they'd say.
This kind of thing is particularly disastrous for poor kids. Kids from
privileged backgrounds, whose parents have a house of books and
newspapers, will learn in almost any situation, regardless of how
educationally successful they are. But other kids should not be left to
add and subtract. I do find this troubling and obviously a vacuous
idea.

Q:I was surprised to read that your own children attended
a progressive school.

A: They went to a progressive school and studied Latin. As in
most progressive schools, there were lots of projects, but the projects
were always tied into learning real things. One of my kids prepared to
be general counsel in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education
case. Everything was always well thought out and connected to subject
matter.

Q:In Left Back you write that anything "labeled a
movement should be avoided like the plague." But isn't the effort to
establish standards, with which you're deeply associated, a
movement?

A: I don't think so, because I believe that the very nature
of education requires that adults agree on what they want children to
learn, conscientiously shape a curriculum that defines what it is to be
taught, seek means of determining whether children have learned what
was taught in order to improve instruction, and help those who are
falling behind. Every profession, every organized activity—be it
medicine or basketball—operates within a context of consensus
about what its purposes are. Absent standards for students and
teachers, education becomes aimless and episodic.

Q:What is your own hope for school reform?

A: My book is an argument for having kids educated in the
same way the most favorably situated people in society educate their
own children. I'd like to see all kids get the education I was able to
provide for my children, and a lot of education in the last century has
been about finding ways not to let that happen.

A recent installment of Slate.com's
Book Club features a lively discussion of Diane Ravitch's Left
Back and Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections.

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